Feedwordpress has an issue with creating duplicate posts. This duplication does not happen predictably, however, so it is hard to debug it. I need to be able to reproduce duplicating posts before I can go any further. Has anyone been able to reproduce duplicate posts when a feed is updated using feedwordpress? If so, what steps did you follow to force a duplicate of a post to be created during an update to the feed?

As an additional note, I do know that the GUID database field is not set in the duplicate post. This is one of the ways I am able to distinguish duplicates from the original. There could be 5 duplicates, all of which have no GUID set, but only one original with the GUID set.

2 Answers
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The FeedWordPress Duplicate Post Filter add-on might take care of this faster than trying to hunt down the root cause. It'll probably turn out to be a problem in the feed itself, which you wouldn't likely have any control over.

Despite the formats being fairly simple and well-documented, many sites/applications just can't seem to produce a proper feed, for some reason. There are so many things done wrong in so many ways it's generally less work to just deal with it than try and actually hunt down the source of a single case.

This may largely depend not on plugin itself, but on source feed. Assuming RSS 2.0 (I am most acquainted with) the unique identification of post can be tricky.

By the letter guid should be unique identifier (it may or may not be a link), but actuall feeds in the wild can be a mess. Advanced RSS clients usually try to juggle guid, link and even time as identifiers of uniqueness.

If source feed is not generated reliably then client can have trouble distinguishing posts in it as unique.